US Social Security Wasted $300 Million on an IT Boondoggle

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Ah, it’s always a joy to see your tax dollars at work, especially involving IT personnel, except when $300 Million is spent on modernizing Social Security technology for the past six years with no finished product in sight. These must be the same guys who worked on the Affordable Care Act site. :D

Among the issues found by the auditors was poor management, confusion in planning and delays in development, which led to multiple missed deadlines and a project that has yet to move beyond a beta testing phase.
 
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These contracts are getting more and more depressing...

Higher ups gets nice idea, decides to contract a company with the lowest bid to cover said idea.
Higher ups have no time to monitor said progress except maybe monthly where they are lied to.
Higher ups ask their workers to watch over the contractors and report on work, no one cares enough to do a thorough job.
Contractors come in yearly to ask for more money because they asked too low of a price.
 
Follow the money trail in both directions. People need to be held accountable and contractors should be sued or imprisoned, but I bet they have outs in their contracts.
 
A big part of the problem is the bidding process. The bidding process is so f'd up that only a company like Lockheed will bid on the project. Then each department, branch and division will have their own "must have" requirements that you as the contractor cannot, dare not question. The person who is your liaison, will have no authority to do anything and no idea what is going on, but will have bizarre metrics that have nothing to do with the project, he will need for his reporting. The IT division will actively work against you because they are a bunch of guys who swear NT 4.0 is the most secure OS and can't fathom why a system needs more than 4GB RAM. You will have at least one manager that is an IT expert declare everything needs to be converted to blades servers and virtual desktops, then will freak out once he sees the cost.

I have no involvement in this project, but I have done my share of government bids.
 
A big part of the problem is the fact the government is totally incompetent to do anything the private sector does every day and makes a profit.
 
In the private sector this would of cost $350 million and half that would of gone to upper level managements paychecks.
 
These contracts are getting more and more depressing...

Higher ups gets nice idea, decides to contract a company with the lowest bid to cover said idea.
I wish it were that simple, but its usually far more political than that.

Preference is given to minority, female, and disability owned businesses, and even then it has to be the ones that are either the most politically connected or go through a vetting process to ensure they represent the ruling party's desired image for publicity. So sure, there may be some well known large company that could successfully implement this for you, but that isn't even LOOKED at, as they find some random small startup run by an outgoing young black lesbian little person on crutches and they ooh and ahh and throw money.

Its ridiculous, but it really matters to the government if you're MWBE certified.
 
Political social engineering, unfortunately it is the best elected officials (elected by you and me) can get to sounding good, looking good, bending to pressure.
fwiw, the Revolutionary War was paid for by contributions, scams, misdemeanors, fraud, and defaulted loans. Not the best business model.
 
I wish it were that simple, but its usually far more political than that.

Preference is given to minority, female, and disability owned businesses, and even then it has to be the ones that are either the most politically connected or go through a vetting process to ensure they represent the ruling party's desired image for publicity. So sure, there may be some well known large company that could successfully implement this for you, but that isn't even LOOKED at, as they find some random small startup run by an outgoing young black lesbian little person on crutches and they ooh and ahh and throw money.

Its ridiculous, but it really matters to the government if you're MWBE certified.

Throw in the ever changing goalposts these type of government projects can have. Feature creep due suddenly must have capabilities someone heard of, or sudden requirements changes due to "security". Leadership changes bringing new wants to the project, and it can be tough to ever finish a contract job. Look at the history of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle if you want an example of how bad it can be.


I spent some time doing government work. So, I am not going to put 100% of the blame on the contractor at this point. Though "can't actually do it" contractors awarded the contract on grounds other than fitness to do the job or price, have been a serious problem for a long time.
 
If you think that's bad you should look up the budget for some of the stuff the DoD works on. I'm aware of one program that has been in the works for going on 15 years and still isn't meeting expectations.
 
and these sons-a-bitches gave me shit about a $970 a month temporary disability!!! Fucking idiots.
 
Private companies routinely eat loses of the magnitude or far greater on given ventures that turn out to fail.

You know full well, that there are vast distinctions between private ventures eating this kind of money vs. government wasting this kind of money.
 
A big part of the problem is the fact the government is totally incompetent to do anything the private sector does every day and makes a profit.

Incompetence is only half the problem. The other half is intentional (competent) corruption. And the private sector is equally incompetent and corrupt. The mainstream media does not give time/attention to most of the corruption/incompetence in government, but it gives even less to the amount of corruption/incompetence in private business.
 
Incompetence is only half the problem. The other half is intentional (competent) corruption. And the private sector is equally incompetent and corrupt. The mainstream media does not give time/attention to most of the corruption/incompetence in government, but it gives even less to the amount of corruption/incompetence in private business.

Yeah but at least they turn a profit!!!
 
So which senator or congressman who brought this idea up had a friend or owned shares in the company who got this contract or who sent a lot of jobs to a district they actually represent? Those are the money trails you should be following.
 
its not theft if they give you (anything) in return


here's a moldy sandwich. thanks for the money.
 
A big part of the problem is the fact the government is totally incompetent to do anything the private sector does every day and makes a profit.
In the private sector ....

You guys realize the work is all being done by Lockheed Martin, a private sector company, right? The SSA contracted them to do all the work.

In 2010 the administration commissioned an update project, contracting Lockheed Martin to build the system with a delivery date for 2015.
That quote is from the 3rd paragraph of the article. The whole article itself is very short, around 15 paragraphs long.

As others have noted the problem + corruption is with the contracting requirements and the lobbying done by these private sector companies to get the contracts written in their favor. That is how Halliburton won all those no-bid contracts.
 
These contracts are getting more and more depressing...

Higher ups gets nice idea, decides to contract a company with the lowest bid to cover said idea.
Higher ups have no time to monitor said progress except maybe monthly where they are lied to.
Higher ups ask their workers to watch over the contractors and report on work, no one cares enough to do a thorough job.
Contractors come in yearly to ask for more money because they asked too low of a price.
That's not really how it works. They don't go with the lowest bidder. I've bid government contracts before and more than once they've come back and told me I need to raise my price. They're not going with the lowest bidder, not even close.

The problem is that it's all very political. They hire friends, want to micromanage things to death without any real knowledge, lock down contractors with so much red tape they can't do their job. I charge 400x more for government contracts (no joke) because of the runaround they give me with paperwork, restrictions, testing, etc. It's a mess that has nothing to do with the low bidder.
 
CGI Federal built the obamacare website, so really, I blame the free market for that failure.
 
It took very little digging to go beyond the hyperbolic headlines.

The planning for the upgrade is what started 6 or more years ago (page 32 of McKinsey report starts in Q3'08), with the original recommendation released in early 2009. Bidding was opened in 2009, Lockheed Martin and other contractors were selected in 2011. Initial testing began in late 2012.

From what I can see from reading the report and the timeline of when the project phases actually started, this just looks like an over-dramatic slam of a project that may have trouble meeting its launch target next year. The McKinzie report actually looks like it was made by someone with no clue of how software development works. The assumption seems to be that once the bid was accepted, version 1.0 should have been available immediately. Seriously. (See the chart with "5 year delay" on it.)

There are plenty of things which could be used to illustrate government incompetence, but this doesn't seem to be a very good example. The report is quite disingenuous as it repeats the original cost of contractor development and then lumps in regular SSA operation costs to inflate the cost estimate.
 
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